Chapter 1 – Childhood

There is a question I ask at the beginning of this book, and it deserves to be asked here too: what does a childhood in Niort in the nineteen-sixties, strawberries in a garden, a grandmother making crêpes, and a teacher who taps knuckles with a ruler, have to do with wisdom?
Everything, as it turns out. 

The first chapter: my childhood

Chapter 1 is dense, built like a mosaic of portraits and places. My parents, my sister, Mamie D., Papi and Mamie C., school, sports. Six sequences that together form the foundation for everything that follows.

It is a panorama of my developmental forces: the people who mattered, the places where something settled, the experiences that left their marks, sometimes gentle, sometimes sharp. 

What this chapter is about

It reveals my childhood rooted in nature and in connection. A father who teaches his daughter to identify birds by their song and mushrooms by their shape. A mother who turns strawberries from the garden into open sandwiches. Sundays at the paternal grandparents’ in the countryside, where the strawberries, again, disappeared straight from the plant before ever reaching the table.

But there are also the shadows. My primary school teacher who handed out ruler-taps on fingers and paraded children around the playground with their ink-stained pages pinned to their backs. The dark cellar and its recurring nightmares. The foods impossible to swallow, the pain of being left alone at the table or on the terrace. The arguments with a sister who refused to play with dolls.

This chapter tells the story of a real and imperfect childhood, with its deep joys and its small wounds, and above all with the ordinary people who passed on extraordinary things without ever putting them into words. 

The Strawberries of Wisdom: six themes, one foundation

After the narrative chapter come six Strawberries of Wisdom, the reflective sections that give the entire series its title. Each one takes a theme rooted in lived experiences and opens it into something broader:

Family as the first laboratory of human relationships: learning to listen, to ask for forgiveness, to stay connected despite tension.

Resilience and Courage: the kind that whispers, try again, after every fall, large or small.

Curiosity and Creativity: the flame of childhood that, if you don’t smother it, becomes a whole way of living.

Generosity, Kindness, Empathy and Gratitude: the gestures of the heart that shift the atmosphere of a life, one by one.

Trust: the kind that is built in the caring gaze of those who raise us.

And Health: the kind born from joyful movement, shared meals, and breath found again in the forest.  

What makes this chapter particular

This first chapter establishes something the chapters that follow will either confirm or challenge: the conviction that wisdom is not taught in a classroom. It is passed on through gestures, habits and examples. A grandmother who sings while washing dishes. A father who stays calm when the situation is not. A mother who scolds her child for a hurtful remark made in front of the person concerned, and in doing so hands her a moral compass for the rest of her life.

This chapter also says something important about wounds. They are there, named, looked at, not absent nor minimised. And treated not as handicaps, but as the earliest teachers.  

The recipe and the poem

The chapter closes with a poem dedicated to the young strawberry and the wisdom it represents, followed by my favourite recipe from early childhood, Mamie’s Cake : an apple and cinnamon cake, simple, unfussy, measured in tablespoons rather than precise grams. The choice is not accidental. It says something about the relationship to the knowledge running through this book: concrete, accessible, drawn from practice rather than theory.  

Going further

Chapter 1 is an invitation to look at your own childhood differently, to find the roots, the good ones and the less good ones, without blame or excuse, that continue to feed the person you have become.

The question this chapter asks, between the lines, is this: what were you made of, without knowing it?

The next articles will explore each section of this book in more detail, starting with the chapter about my parents and the garden where it all began.